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Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence

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Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Thu, 01 Apr 2021 07:40:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Atlas of AI This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Thu, 01 Apr 2021 07:40:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This page intentionally left blank This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Thu, 01 Apr 2021 07:40:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Atlas of AI Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence KATE CRAWFORD New Haven and London This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Thu, 01 Apr 2021 07:40:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Copyright © 2021 by Kate Crawford. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e- mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Cover design and chapter opening illustrations by Vladan Joler. Set in Minion by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020947842 ISBN 978- 0- 300- 20957- 0 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Thu, 01 Apr 2021 07:40:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms For Elliott and Margaret This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Thu, 01 Apr 2021 07:40:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This page intentionally left blank This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Thu, 01 Apr 2021 07:40:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Contents Introduction 1 ONe. Earth 23 twO. Labor 53 three. Data 89 fOur. Classification 123 fIve. Affect 151 SIx. State 181 CONClusion. Power 211 COdA. Space 229 Acknowledgments 239 Notes 245 Bibliography 269 Index 315 This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Thu, 01 Apr 2021 07:40:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Thu, 01 Apr 2021 07:40:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction The Smartest Horse in the World t the end of the nineteenth century, Europe was captivated by a horse called Hans. “Clever Hans” was nothing less than a marvel: he could solve math problems, tell time, identify days on a calendar, dif- Aferentiate musical tones, and spell out words and sentences. People flocked to watch the German stallion tap out answers to complex problems with his hoof and consistently arrive at the right answer. “What is two plus three?” Hans would dili- gently tap his hoof on the ground five times. “What day of the week is it?” The horse would then tap his hoof to indicate each letter on a purpose-built letter board and spell out the correct answer. Hans even mastered more complex questions, such as, “I have a number in mind. I subtract nine and have three as a remainder. What is the number?” By 1904, Clever Hans was an international celebrity, with the New York Times championing him as “Berlin’s Wonderful Horse; He Can Do Almost Every- thing but Talk.”1 Hans’s trainer, a retired math teacher named Wilhelm von Osten, had long been fascinated by animal intelligence. This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Thu, 01 Apr 2021 07:40:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 2 Introduction Von Osten had tried and failed to teach kittens and bear cubs cardinal numbers, but it wasn’t until he started working with his own horse that he had success. He first taught Hans to count by holding the animal’s leg, showing him a number, and then tapping on the hoof the correct number of times. Soon Hans responded by accurately tapping out simple sums. Next von Osten introduced a chalkboard with the alphabet spelled out, so Hans could tap a number for each letter on the board. After two years of training, von Osten was astounded by the animal’s strong grasp of advanced intellectual concepts. So he took Hans on the road as proof that animals could reason. Hans became the viral sensation of the belle époque. But many people were skeptical, and the German board of education launched an investigative commission to test Von Osten’s scientific claims. The Hans Commission was led by the psychologist and philosopher Carl Stumpf and his assis- tant Oskar Pfungst, and it included a circus manager, a retired schoolteacher, a zoologist, a veterinarian, and a cavalry officer. Yet after extensive questioning of Hans, both with his trainer present and without, the horse maintained his record of cor- rect answers, and the commission could find no evidence of deception. As Pfungst later wrote, Hans performed in front of “thousands of spectators, horse-fanciers, trick- trainers of first rank, and not one of them during the course of many months’ observations are able to discover any kind of regular signal” between the questioner and the horse.2 The commission found that the methods Hans had been taught were more like “teaching children in elementary schools” than animal training and were “worthy of scientific examination.”3 But Strumpf and Pfungst still had doubts. One finding in particular troubled them: when the questioner did not know the answer or was standing far away, Hans rarely gave the correct answer. This led Pfungst and Strumpf to con- This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Thu, 01 Apr 2021 07:40:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction 3 Wilhelm von Osten and Clever Hans sider whether some sort of unintentional signal had been pro- viding Hans with the answers. As Pfungst would describe in his 1911 book, their intu- ition was right: the questioner’s posture, breathing, and facial expression would subtly change around the moment Hans reached the right answer, prompting Hans to stop there.4 Pfungst later tested this hypothesis on human subjects and confirmed his result. What fascinated him most about this discovery was that questioners were generally unaware that they were providing pointers to the horse. The solution to the Clever Hans riddle, Pfungst wrote, was the unconscious di- rection from the horse’s questioners.5 The horse was trained to produce the results his owner wanted to see, but audiences felt that this was not the extraordinary intelligence they had imagined. The story of Clever Hans is compelling from many angles: the relationship between desire, illusion, and action, the busi- ness of spectacles, how we anthropomorphize the nonhuman, This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Thu, 01 Apr 2021 07:40:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 4 Introduction how biases emerge, and the politics of intelligence. Hans in- spired a term in psychology for a particular type of conceptual trap, the Clever Hans Effect or observer- expectancy effect, to describe the influence of experimenters’ unintentional cues on their subjects. The relationship between Hans and von Osten points to the complex mechanisms by which biases find their ways into systems and how people become entangled with the phenomena they study. The story of Hans is now used in ma- chine learning as a cautionary reminder that you can’t always be sure of what a model has learned from the data it has been given.6 Even a system that appears to perform spectacularly in training can make terrible predictions when presented with novel data in the world. This opens a central question of this book: How is intel- ligence “made,” and what traps can that create? At first glance, the story of Clever Hans is a story of how one man constructed intelligence by training a horse to follow cues and emulate humanlike cognition. But at another level, we see that the prac- tice of making intelligence was considerably broader. The en- deavor required validation from multiple institutions, includ- ing academia, schools, science, the public, and the military. Then there was the market for von Osten and his remarkable horse—emotional and economic investments that drove the tours, the newspaper stories, and the lectures. Bureaucratic au- thorities were assembled to measure and test the horse’s abili- ties. A constellation of financial, cultural, and scientific inter- ests had a part to play in the construction of Hans’s intelligence and a stake in whether it was truly remarkable. We can see two distinct mythologies at work. The first myth is that nonhuman systems (be it computers or horses) are analogues for human minds. This perspective assumes that with sufficient training, or enough resources, humanlike intel- ligence can be created from scratch, without addressing the This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Thu, 01 Apr 2021 07:40:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction 5 fundamental ways in which humans are embodied, relational, and set within wider ecologies.
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